You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The donkey faced woman and the pink shirted huckster.
The upscale steak house is packed.
We put our name in with the host and we’re told it will be 40 minutes.
We survey the rectangular bar in the middle of the room. The bartenders are inside the marble monolith, waiting on customers who fill up every square foot.
The bar is a frenzy of Friday night activity. Heads are bobbing and glasses tinkling. There’s alow rumble of a hundred conversations about mundane life stirred into a ho hum existence.
Girlfriend and I watch for the usual signs of opportunity. Couples signing their bill, tipping their wine glass up to get the last drop, people checking their iphones to see if the baby sitter has texted an emergency.
“Anything?,” I say quietly.
Girlfriend squints, observing the bar like a jeweler analyzing the cut of a diamond.
Her head is on a swivel, like a periscope with a cross hair surveying the horizon.
I wait for a reply. None has been offered.
Humans have five senses. Hearing, touching, tasting, seeing, and smelling. But like a classic sports car, she has an extra gear. She has a 6th sense. The ability to detect a designer brand from a hundred yards in bad lighting.
See that woman over there in the corner, in the darkness, moving to the bathroom through the shadows?
My eyes are so bad I can barely see the host stand.
She doesn’t wait for a reply. “Jimmy Choos,” she’ll say confidently to me.
I’ll look at her and nod. I don’t know Jimmy Choo from Jimmy Dynamite Walker.
Girlfriend knows her merchandise. She can detect a sparkle from a hundred paces. Like an eagle soaring over a field spotting the elusive field mouse, she can tell me in an instant if it is Rolex or Timex.
I do not have this 6th sense. When it comes to brand identification, I am like the blind man in the Subway, guessing where the train is going.
And then there’s the 7th sense! The elusive, 7th sense. This is the telekinetic realm of existence where egg headed children bend forks in a Matrix movie.
Most of us burger flippers of life are just trying to govern our 5 senses. Smelling and tasting at the same time is too much for some of the bags of flesh on this planet. So 7th sense management? Nobody has a 7th sense right? Girlfriend does. It’s a very unique and specific power that comes in handy more than you’d know.
She has the mysterious ability to feel the air currents quiver and the electrical impulses of the atmosphere bend. Once inside of a dining establishment, she can sense the tiniest molecular disruption that occurs just before someone is about to vacate their seat at the bar.
I’ve seen it a hundred times. She’s like a lion on the plains. She stands, on the crest of the dune, surveying the herd. She inhales the vibe, detects the moment, and quickly surmises which of the pack is weak and must be killed with the least amount of waiting or effort.
“You feeling anything?”
She surveys the bar. Her nose slightly elevated as if she is sniffing the air for imperfections in the bar-space continuum.
“Homesteaders,” she replies.
That’s not good.
I shuffle my feet, trying to inch closer to the bar. But there is nowhere to move. If this was the Titanic, I’d be in steerage standing in straw, slurping gruel, while the lucky souls 6 inches in front of me are on the observation deck, eating caviar and listening to the violinists play.
I continue to look at the bar patrons using what little of the five senses I have left.
I stare at the bartender, hoping he will cast us a look. All I need is eye contact. Like a hypnotist in a Kansas Carnival, if I can get eye contact with the man behind the bar, I will lure him in, compel him to move to my position and take my drink order.
I try and summon the young buck behind the bar with my thoughts. I squeeze my brain against the inside of my skull, squinting my eyes and grinding my core.
The young buck of a bartender moves effortlessly inside the rectangle. He is like an ice skater, gliding from drink to drink, free of my invisible spell.
My hand is twitching. I’m a dog and the clank of wine glasses is Pavlov’s bell. I am salivating as the beer taps before me twinkle in the golden light, their spouts still wet with the sweet nectar of the most fashionable IPA.
I imagine the delectable liquid pouring down my throat, coating my insides with a cool libation that will eradicate the stress of a long tough work week.
Since I have no drink and cannot move any closer to the bar without performing a cavity search on the old folks seated before me, I scan the clientele lucky enough to already be enjoying their Friday night.
The guy across the bar in the corner is standing. He’s a bar peacock making sure he can be seen. He is obvious like an LED Christmas ornament on an Amish barn. Next to him are two blonds. They are laughing and consuming the moment. They appear to be impressed with the man gyrating above them. He is like an organ grinder’s monkey, reaching into the crowd for trinkets.
It’s 7:30 on a Friday night in Middle Tennessee. Banks have been closed for 3 hours. Yet this man acts like he is a financier and his phone is about to ring and the biggest deal in the history of deals is about to go down. He is wearing a crisp pin stripe suit with white collar and starched cuffs. He has a large sparkly watch the size of a filet.
The guy’s a Poser, I think to myself. This guy is compensating for a thinning hairline and middle aged beer gut. I can only imagine the compensation issues going on below the belt.
My attention moves back to the waiter. He is a rock star, every eye on him as he silently controls who will drink what and when.
“Tough crowd,” I say in a whisper.
Then it happens. Girlfriend uses her eyes to silently command me to look to my left.
I tilt my head, just in time to see a large woman seated at the bar. She has a pasty face with straggly black hairs. Unattractive would be a kind way to describe her complexion. She is wearing a shirt that badly conceals a roll of belly fat, slopping over her non-descript pants. I watch as she picks up her plate and holds it in front of her face. The plate is the size of a carry on bag. The plate is brilliant white and it creates a glare from the powerful overhead lights that reflect off the smooth ceramic surface like a spot light on a Broadway stage.
I watch in horrified disbelief as the woman uses her fork to shovel the remnants of something edible to the edge of her plate. Her nose and mouth are hovering 3 inches from the growing mound that she is scraping together, using her fork to assemble the food particles like one would use a rake to assemble a pile of autumn leaves on the front lawn.
She captures the pulpy mass with her fork and then bends forward to the edge of the plate. Her pants squeal under the sudden torque as she begins shoveling the brown seaweed like matter over the edge of the plate and into her lips.
Her mouth chomps down on the fork, inhaling the last morsel of whatever that was.
The moment reminds me of farm mechanization where a simple task once performed by a man is now automated and impersonal.
As the woman with the belly fat chews the seaweed like mound, she continues to hold the plate before her face.
She is like a farm animal, under the spotlight, sticking her snout into the trough licking the last morsel of feed into her face.
Who does this? I think to myself. This is an upscale establishment and this woman is bent at the waist snorkeling food into her mouth.
It’s disgusting and rude and somehow primitive.
I feel like grabbing a lit fire spear and dancing around this rotund woman who has the manners of a mule. I will scream at the primal sky and pray for divine intervention.
Did someone order an exorcism the bartender will ask bringing over a flaming glass of blood.
Like a scene from Lord of the Flies the bar will fill with illuminated sparks and those in attendance will throw burning palm leaves covered in sacramental oil.
The Donkey woman will slowly lower the plate and ask for forgiveness.
Instead of grabbing a fire spear, performing an exorcism or saving her soul, I stare at her silently.
I am repulsed, but cannot look away.
“That’s disgusting,” girlfriend says in a tone more audible than she knows.
I smile. It’s disgusting like a slow motion car wreck. I watch her chew. I watch the muscles in her jowly face gnaw on the metallic prongs of the fork.
It’s as if she is trying to lick the molecular properties off the utensil, to get the last taste of the seaweed concoction that is now in her belly adding to the surplus of excess that will attach itself to her ever expanding ass.
“How you folks doing?,” the man next to her bellows suddenly.
His voice comes out of nowhere. It surprises me like a mugger in a dark alley.
How I didn’t notice him seated beside the human consumption machine is a mystery.
He is brightly adorned in a pink golf shirt and snazzy trousers. His hair is bleached and standing tall. His head reminds me of sunbaked grass on the Serengeti.
The man, also in his late 40’s or early 50’s has a tan face. His eyes are light colored, not quite distinguishable in the diffracted lighting of the bar.
“It’s been a hard week,” he continues, talking over the prehistoric hill billy woman still holding the plate before her face.
I look at the man. He is well groomed, fit, eager to engage socially.
Why is he with this bridge troll?, I silently ponder.
I wonder if this is that show – WHAT WOULD YOU DO? I look for John Quinones to pop out of the darkness.
I try and not be rude. I try and act like I always talk to people through a gnawing donkey face holding a plate to her lips.
“How are you?”
Three simple words. How. Are. You.
They are like a key to a door that unlock a waterfall of never-ending.
The words pour from his mouth, cascading around us, drowning us, suffocating us, robbing us of our soul.
HAVE YOU EVER EATEN HERE BEFORE?
WE KNOW THE BARTENDER.
HE IS JUST BACK FROM FLORIDA.
HAVE YOU EVER EATEN AT THE BLAH BLAH BLAH RESTAURANT DOWNTOWN?
I PARKED MY CAR AND A BIRD POOPED ON IT. I DIDN’T WANT TO MAKE AN ISSUE OF IT. I CALLED. THEY GAVE ME A TABLE ON A CROWDED NIGHT.
THEY HAVE A BAND ON A BALCONY OVER THE BAR. IT’S THE BEST.
MY WEEK WAS SO STRESSFUL.
I grab onto girlfriend. She is agitated. She is being quietly polite, but the man’s incessant onslaught of words are suffocating her.
The man is a tennis ball machine, his mouth plugged into a power source, launching words like bright green orbs at me. Whap. Whap. Whap. One word after another.
I try and hit a sentence back over the net, but before I can make contact, he launches another word at me. Suddenly there are 2 and then 3 and then 4 sentences racing at me. I only have one racquet, one brain, one mouth. I can only handle so much auditory stimuli at a time.
WE LIVE IN BRENTWOOD, BEHIND THE LIBRARY NEAR CONCORD ROAD.
WHERE DO YOU LIVE?
OH THAT’S A GREAT NEIGHBORHOOD.
Each sentence steals some oxygen from the room. Every snap of his tongue against his teeth is a metallic screech that pierces my ears and makes my spine hurt.
I don’t know how much more polite I have in me.
I remain quiet, not answering his latest volley of words and thoughts and unprovoked diatribe.
The sound of the bar fills up the space. It is awkward. I feel like walking away, perhaps to the other side of the bar. I wonder if the make believe banker will be my new friend?
The mule faced woman has lowered her plate by this time. The bartender quickly takes it from her, silently horrified at this manifestation of poor bar etiquette.
The man with the rising hair and indistinguishable eyes begins to talk again. I feel him trying to somehow trick me, to run a scam on me, to spin the coconuts on the table and take my money.
I am losing consciousness. His words are 2 atmospheres of pressure and it’s hard to make my chest move.
Just as I feel myself about to hit the floor, the hostess arrives.
“Your table for two is ready.”
It’s a life preserver in a churning sea of semantics.
The man in the pink golf shirt smiles, knowing that his opportunity to steal any of my money or take any more of my time is gone.
Girlfriend smiles and dashes from the moment.
She is a powder keg, about to explode.
I smile and say good bye.
And with that, I leave the donkey faced woman and the pink shirt huckster behind.
We walk by the make believe banker at the corner of the bar.
I look at him and laugh.
He is a pretender too, spewing his words into the dizzy faces of anyone who will listen.
We sit down and the hostess moves away.
“OH MY GOD,” Girlfriend says leaning forward. “He wouldn’t shut up.”
I laugh as the waitress comes to the table.
“Drinks?”
Oh yes we reply in unison.
Make it a double.
And hold the donkey face.
Life’s Crazy™